Mediacom working to restore service in Albany

ALBANY — As many Albany area residents continue working to get their lives back in order following a vicious winter storm that ravaged several parts of the city, officials with area communications provider Mediacom say they hope to do their part to get people reconnected as quickly as possible.

Phil Skinner, Mediacom’s director of operations in Southwest Georgia, said crews from his company have been on the ground since last Jan. 3, working to get as much of the company’s fiber-optic and coaxial infrastructure working as possible and assessing damage around the city.

“We’ve ridden through all the damaged areas and done assessments, so we know exactly what we’re dealing with,” Skinner said Monday afternoon. “We know exactly what we need to do.”

What the company’s multiple teams of technicians and construction crews will be doing, Skinner said, is working with city officials to figure out which areas of the city have had commercial power restored, since that must happen before Mediacom’s teams can replace damaged hardline.

Skinner said Mediacom currently has 28 miles of what he called “plant” (the physical cabling and infrastructure used to carry phone, cable and internet signals) lying on the ground that needed to be replaced, before the company can send out additional teams to put up the “drops” (which take the signal from the pole to a residence or business).

“Our goal is to have this done fairly quickly,” Skinner said. “We’ve got four crews working today (Monday), and we’ll add an additional four crews on Wednesday. We just want to get service restored as quickly as we can once the power has been restored.”

In addition to getting the infrastructure in place, Skinner said the company is doing its work without having to burden customers. He said there is no need for customers who have lost service to contact the company. Mediacom has a record of all of its customers in the area, and crews will simply arrive at each location and reconnect what’s missing.

“There’s so many homes that have been damaged and people affected,” he said. “Folks have been through an awful lot. We want to get their cable and internet restored as quickly as possible and let them get back to some sense of normalcy.”

Skinner said the company has a record of all the customers who have been without service, and the length of time they’ve been without it, and will issue credits to those customers’ accounts as soon as the service is restored. That, he said, means people dealing with other storm-related issues won’t have to be further inconvenienced by having to call and request a credit.

“They don’t need to call us,” Skinner said. “We have a list of active customers.”